Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Labour took a gamble on the economy – and lost. The voters have noticed

So George Osborne wasn’t cutting the economy too far or too fast after all. UK GDP accelerated to 0.8 per cent between July and September, its fastest rate for three years.

Over the next week or so there will be lots of attempts to “get behind the back” of today’s growth figures. How trend levels are still below their pre-recession peak. The way the recovery is not yet being felt in people’s pay packets. That it is based on precisely the same sort of explosion in the housing market that precipitated the 2008 crash.

Some, perhaps all, of that analysis may prove to be correct. But in political terms it is just white noise. The Government got the big call on the biggest issue of all right. Labour got it wrong.

Over the past few weeks Labour advisers have been growing increasingly alarmed that their success in shaping the Westminster agenda around soaring energy bills has not been feeding through into the opinion polls. They have also been arguing a “paper recovery” would be meaningless if it didn’t start to ease the cost of living crisis. “People don’t read IMF GDP estimates,” is the line being deployed by Labour spokesmen.

And it’s not a bad line. Some people, particularly on the Labour side, are buying it. But they shouldn’t.

Ed Balls and Ed Miliband took a strategic decision to hold what in football parlance is a “high line” on the economy. This basically involves pushing your defenders up towards the half-way line in an attempt to catch your opponents off-side. When deployed skilfully, it can be an effective defensive technique; for a time. But sooner or later a well-timed pass and run will see the line breached. And then there is no way back.

This is what’s just happened to Labour. They gambled that the Government’s economic strategy would push the economic and political cycles out of alignment. It hasn’t. They claimed the promised private sector jobs would never materialise, and unemployment would raise. But they did, and it’s fallen. They said Plan A was doomed to failure, and only a Plan B would work. But Plan A has worked after all.

Today’s growth figures will not see an overnight change in either party’s political fortunes. People do not, as the Labour spinners rightly argue, digest growth figures with their cornflakes.

But the message is out there, and it is slowly but surely starting to permeate the consciousness of the electorate. The Conservatives got it right on the economy. And Labour got it wrong.